They are gone! Today was the final parade of sail, and the fleet of Tall Ships left Halifax after 5 crazy days. Restaurants ran out of food, downtown was stuffed with people, and the waterfront -don't ask! Me and a bunch of fellow kayakers gathered this morning on McNabs Island in the middle of the harbour to watch the big final show. Untypical for Nova Scotia there was no rain and no fog during the last couple of days, just plain sun shine and blue sky. We headed out at 6:30 this morning to beat the crowd and the traffic jam. At 8:30 the first Tall Ships left the piers, most of them under sails, took a turn, came back passed the water front a last time and then they took of to Europe. After about 30 minutes we became bored on our island and jumped back in the yaks. After scouting out how close the coast guard and harbour patrol let us get to the parade route we held this position for almost 2 hours while the 100+ ships sailed in and out the harbour. What a show to see this giant sail boats. After the last one left I took a final look out to the horizon and got a impression how it might had been a 150-200 years ago with all this sails heading east.. Then the chaos broke out. All the pleasure boaters started moving their jet skies, power boats , sail boats, kayaks and canoes at the same time. A friend told me that it was the same on the streets in and around town, when all the land lubbers headed from the shoreline for lunch (40 minutes waiting in line-up for fish and chips). I hope the Tall Ships will be back on tour not to far in the future (2004 was mentioned in the radio), we had fabulous days in our Small Ships poking around the Tall Ships Cheers Ulli Ulli Hoeger Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada uhoeger_at_is.dal.ca web://is.dal.ca/~uhoeger/ *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced/forwarded outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:33:15 PDT